NATHAN NEWMAN

Who Killed Carlo Giuliani?

Who killed Carlo Giuliani? In one sense, a death in Genoa was
predictable, practically predicted by Silvio Berlusconi, the new
Italian prime minister, who boasted of the military hardware to be
deployed against protesters. In an environment of militarized
repression, armed paramilitary squads, and good evidence of
government-backed provocateurs inciting violence, death was nearly
inevitable.

The G-8, representing the world's most powerful industrialized
nations, met to mouth pretty words about poverty in the third world,
even as their policies backing multinational corporations and denying
medicine to the third world have murdered millions yearly. So what
was one more death?

Progressive observers rightly have debated the actions Carlo may
have taken that led to his death, but in an environment of repression
which had systematically violated legitimate means of protest, anger
in the streets incited by government provocateurs was a recipe for
tragedy.

The reality of Genoa was that you had a scared and angry 23-year
old protester facing off against a scared, probably angry 20-year old
paramilitary cop in a militarized zone, where the young cop was
issued live ammunition. You don't have to think that Carlo was a
selfless martyr or that the cop was a demon to understand that the
global leaders who set them both up are criminals. The elite wants to
play a game of pitting accusations of evil culpability as cops
denounce protesters and protesters demonize cops. Those leaders had
use for a dead protester as a message and they got it.

But blaming just the G-8 leaders is too easy, since the warnings
were there for the protest movement. When you know the opponent is
coming for you with live ammunition, denouncing the enemy for
carrying out that threat is correct public relations but empty as
strategic evaluation. At a certain point questions have to be asked
what was done or not done by your leadership to prevent the
casualties?

So who killed Carlo Giuliani?

The so-called Black Bloc are the easy ones to blame, promoting a
theatre of violence in defiance of common democratic strategy,
ignoring every sense of solidarity in complete mockery of an
honorable tradition of anarchists in history, and acting as a nicely
disorganized body to harbor police infiltrators and provocateurs. In
a sense, the Black Bloc wanted a dead martyr as their message as much
as the G-8 leadership wanted it for their purposes. Both fed off
their mutual violence parasitically.

Ideologically, the Bloc's individualistic acts of store
destruction are merely an angry mirror to the consumerist
individualism of those who shop there. The emptiness of their actions
allows commentators to rightly dismiss them and, unfortunately,
dismiss the broader disciplined movement against global
capitalism.

Worse, the violence they attract created the context in which
Carlo Giuliani died and helped justify the police repression against
the whole movement. Without newspaper photos and TV screens of
violence as the police's public relations, the bloody Sunday raid on
the nonviolent headquarters of the broad-based Genoa Social Forum
would have caused far greater global outrage. Instead, much of the
public shrugged and washed their hands of both sides of the
conflict.

But again, it's too easy to just blame the Black Bloc, who were
really relatively few in numbers. With tens of thousands of
non-violent protesters in Genoa, any disciplined leadership could
have restrained and shut down the violent wing of the protests. Given
the fact that the police had no real intention of restraining the
violence, the responsibility to "keep the peace" fell to the
leadership of the democratic movement. There are numerous non-violent
ways to restrain such sectarian fringes at rallies, but it takes
political will and strategy to confront them. Unfortunately for Carlo
and the other casualties of Genoa, that political will was
lacking.

So Who Killed Carlo Giuliani?

Back in June, Bobby Seale and a number of other Black Panther
alumni had a conference in New Haven looking back 30 years on the
Panther trials in that city. They had a lot of fascinating
reflections on the organizing of the day, but the one thing all of
them stressed was their own mistakes in letting violence escalate
beyond their point of control, since the cops can always seize on
uncontrolled violence to infiltrate and discredit a movement.

On the panel was a recent New Haven chief of police who had been
on the force back in 1970. He made clear that the cops themselves
were scared out of there minds back then because FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover was feeding them all sorts of "intelligence" about the
supposed murderous goals of the Panthers. The goal of the elite is
always to use clashes between protesters and working class cops
(playing on the sympathies the public often has with the police) to
escalate to the point of discrediting protest. The reason we as
activists have to be concerned about violence, including violence
against the cops, is that our opponents don't care, in fact for all
their protestations, would like nothing better than for a cop to die
in order to justify more repression.

There was, I think, a somewhat unstrategic overconfidence that
developed among protesters post-Seattle. The Seattle cops were
unprepared and played into the propaganda goals of the protesters. As
Philadelphia and now Genoa showed, the cops are no longer unprepared
and are developing both the repressive technology and propaganda to
crush the Black Bloc-style protesters and the rest of the movement if
we don't develop some new strategies to control the escalation of
violence.

This is not an argument for reduced militancy, since discipline is
the most dangerous weapon wielded in protest. Disciplined militancy
demonstrates the power of organization, especially when deployed
creatively. Uncontrolled violence on the other hand is a sign of
weakness and lack of organizational power, for if the democratic
movement cannot muster enough political will to restrain its own
fringe, the elite knows that they have little to worry about either
from such lack of strategic discipline.

Ultimately, protests of tens of thousands, even hundreds of
thousands, are not what will challenge global corporate power. Yet if
disciplined resistance is shown at specific points, those protests
can publicly reflect organizing happening in communities across the
world. That will continue to send the message that a growing global
movement is organizing for radical democratic change worldwide.

On the other hand, if the democratic movement cannot exert that
democratic discipline, they will only be promoting a hopeless
Childrens Crusade, sending more young people like Carlo Giuliani off
to die without purpose.

The choice lies with the movement.

Nathan Newman is a longtime union and community activist and
author of the forthcoming book Net Loss on
Internet policy and economic inequality. Email nathan@newman.org or
see www.nathannewman.org.